


New Reservations

by tenscupcake



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 08:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4052947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenscupcake/pseuds/tenscupcake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few weeks after arriving in the new universe, the Doctor and Rose take a spur-of-the-moment trip together, confident that an adventure away from a cramped flat will help them adjust to the unfamiliar circumstances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	New Reservations

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many, MANY apologies to [dreamsofpetesworld](http://dreamsofpetesworld.tumblr.com), who requested a day of Tentoo/Rose fluff after winning my giveaway back in January. I'm so sorry this is so late, and that there are a few swirls of angst in there with the fluff, but I hope you like it! I had a blast writing it, it's been ages since I've written anything Tentoo. <3

They thought a trip would be a great idea.

He hardly slept at night. Left the pullout couch at regular intervals to tend to the TARDIS coral, sitting on the carpet in his jimjams and specs, cheek in his hand, elbow on his knee, talking to it. Filled their DVR with shows about space or aliens just so he could tell her everything the current theories had wrong the next morning over tea, before she could even fully open her eyes. Climbed up on the balcony railing of her (their) flat and swung his legs over the edge, gazing up at the dim smattering of stars in the grayed-over urban sky. Somehow also found time to scribble in the notebook he kept on the end table near the couch, the one she knew was filled with circular Gallifreyan but hadn’t asked him about yet.

Neither of them was ready for sex, but they spent so many years _not_ talking about their physical relationship or lack thereof that silence was the only way they knew, and it simply remained the elephant in the room. They spent hours talking about what had happened in their years apart, but never about _them_. Some nights an innocent peck goodnight escalated to snogging on the sofa, groping each other like a couple of teenagers, until she claimed she was tired or he claimed he needed to re-check the growth calculations for the thousandth time. Then, more often than not, they’d overcompensate and go for days at a time without any physical contact at all. If they weren’t cooped up inside together so much, maybe it’d be easier.

The flat wasn’t exactly spacious. It was a one-bedroom, a place where she could crash and not do much else; surely she never anticipated him essentially moving into it with her. He shared her closet, they always seemed to need the bathroom at the same time, and he liked to help her cook but they bumped into each other constantly in the tiny kitchen.

 _He didn’t sign up for this_ , she thought. The slow path, settling down in one place without much choice in the matter. Severed from the last telepathic connection he had left – his ship – something she still didn’t fully understand the depth of, while knowing they had years yet before theirs was ready, and even then it might not be the same. How lonely was it inside his mind now? He needed a change of scenery soon or he’d go mad.

 _She didn’t sign up for this_ , he thought. Getting stuck with the wrong half of him, always wondering what the half that still had a TARDIS was up to, maybe even wishing she were still on board. Hating the quirks of this universe that set it apart from the one she grew up in. Maybe some novel surroundings would show her their life could still be exciting, that they could still adjust given some time.

From all perspectives, taking a trip together seemed like the best solution to most of their problems.

Three weeks into their new life, he told her he’d never been to Taiwan, and they booked a flight for the next morning within the hour.

The lengthy zeppelin ride in their first-class suite, though, was no less claustrophobic than the flat. He rolled out the single sofa in the tiny room to a bed within thirty minutes of taking off because (unsurprisingly) he hadn’t slept the night before. She tried to climb over him without waking him when she had to leave to use the loo, but his knee jerked and she fell on top of him, rousing him immediately.

She chanted out an apology as he gasped awake and asked what was wrong but she didn’t answer him, scrambling off the bed and slamming the door behind herself. He groaned his embarrassment into his pillow and wondered how they’d ended up here, this terrified of excessive physical contact. They used to snuggle up in the library or in front of the telly for hours, before it all went pear-shaped at Canary Wharf. Maybe a trip forcing them to spend every waking (and sleeping) moment together wasn’t as good an idea as they’d thought.

\---

The first few hours didn’t exactly go as magically as they’d hoped.

The Doctor had insisted they rent a pair of bicycles, rather than have to take another bloody _car_ to get around anywhere like they did back home. Rose would certainly have gotten a citation from law enforcement for accidentally pedaling straight through a stop sign she didn’t see if they weren’t such dead giveaways as tourists. He was searching constantly through his pocket-sized translation book as they encountered civilians, trying to find the right questions to ask and feeling utterly helpless without the TARDIS’ automatic translator.

But they got the hang of it. Took a crash course in traffic laws and picked up a map at a nearby tourism hub. Found enough people who spoke English on the streets that to get the necessary directions to their destinations.

After holding hands walking through forests of cherry blossoms, Rose leaping up on the Doctor’s back during a dragon boat festival, and eating _xiaochi_ from one another’s containers as they strolled through downtown, the dynamic between them finally started to feel normal again. They both relaxed, stopped trying so hard not to make the other uncomfortable.

After dark, they really only followed the crowd to the _Shìlín Yèshì_ , a glowing labyrinth of restaurants and shops bustling with as many tourists as locals.

“Rose!” the Doctor called from behind a curtain a few meters away, several minutes after being dragged from her side by an enthusiastic salesperson. She skipped over to the sound of his voice, wearing the red floral dress with long sleeves and sandals she liked best at the moment. She burst out in giggles when he stepped out from behind the ratty red cloth.

With various modeling poses (she had no clue where he learned), he showed off the somehow both fashionable and ridiculous outfit: a white blazer wide at the shoulders but hugging his waist and stomach, black lapels contrasting against the light blue Oxford shirt with several buttons down. The sleeves of the jacket were too short, the blue sleeves extending past the white, but not like it didn’t fit him, more like they were designed that way. Dark blue jeans and a brown belt with an ostentatious metal buckle and a pair of Aviators polished off the look, but the old red Chucks were still securely tied to his feet.

He swiveled on one toe, put his hands on his hips, crossed his arms over his chest, shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He’d really gone with the employee’s suggestions for a laugh – it wasn’t exactly the typical style of someone pretending to be from England – but he actually sort of liked the new clothes. Perhaps enough to keep them. Both before being separated and after, he’d caught Rose looking at him when she thought he wasn’t. Years earlier, while he was bent over working on the console, years before; now, when she caught him in the kitchen in the early morning without a shirt on. He thought he might take advantage of a chance to make it socially acceptable.

“How do I look?” he asked, just as an echo of a four years-younger version of himself in pajamas asked the same thing in his mind.

“Sexy,” she answered, teeth gleaming through a wide smile as she winked at him, and he thought maybe she was thinking of that moment on the Sycorax ship, too.

“You’ve got to get it,” she added, still giggling, as he turned to stare at himself a bit in the mirror, adjusting the glasses up his nose with his index finger and tugging down on the lapels of the jacket.

“Oh, yes.” His enthusiasm was bolstered rather than dampened by her laughter. All he ever wanted was to make Rose happy. Every time he made her smile or laugh, he gained just a little more hope that maybe, slowly, he could start to make up for all the times he’d made her cry.

“Well.” He rolled the word around in his mouth, just like old times. “You don’t look so bad yourself, Miss Tyler!” Swiping the sunglasses from his eyes and holding the frames against his mouth, he made no effort to hide that he liked what he saw as his gaze slowly drifted down her body.

“Yeah?” She twirled a little, letting the dress flare out around her thighs.

“You look lovely.” His eyes crinkled at the edges as he gave her a lingering, lopsided smile.

“Got all your things?” he asked, leaning into the tiny room behind him to bundle his blue suit and paraphernalia into his arms.

“Yep.” She emphasized the bundle in her own.

“Right, then. Allons-y!” He wagged his eyebrows at her as he held out his hand, wiggling his fingers until she took it in her own.

It wasn’t the sort of store with price tags, she found out as they approached the counter. The cashiers just seemed to gauge the price of each item by looking. As they stood in line, Rose thought it sounded like the customers ahead of them were able to haggle the prices down.

But the Doctor was able to do no such thing. He just stared at the number on the register and scrunched up his forehead for several seconds doing some sort of calculation before reaching into his blue trousers. Rose was glad she’d bought him that wallet from Marks and Spencer, despite his initial aversion. With the sheer number of local notes he had to pass to the waiting store employee, surely they would have been lost in the depths of his pockets otherwise, and they might have been here for hours.

The Doctor mimed his request for a bag to carry their old (well, not new) clothes and they were on their way.

\---

The littlest things, sometimes, that could abruptly remind her this Doctor wasn’t fully Time Lord anymore. The unpleasant odor coming from the bag containing the Doctor’s suit (after a day biking around in warm weather), for one thing. The way his hair was matted and sticky with sweat on his sideburns and forehead, and his meticulous style had become more of a puff of dissolved gel that hardly resembled the perfection it was that morning.

She never dreamed of mentioning these sorts of things to him; she was positive he was acutely aware of the less desirable physiological differences already. _Well, welcome to humanity_ , she’d thought on more than one occasion.

He got in the shower first, a routine they’d fallen into quickly back home since he was about three times faster to bathe. She turned on the telly and flipped through channels until she found one in English. And certainly didn’t dare to walk into the loo to brush her teeth or use the toilet while the Doctor was in the shower, harmless though it may have been.

When the Doctor emerged from the bathroom in his brown pajama trousers and a white t-shirt, Rose silently shuffled past him with a large bundle of clothes and toiletries of her own. Since they’d arrived back in the hotel room, the energy between them had mutated again. From the friendly, flirtatious one he very much enjoyed back to the strictly professional one he very much hated but had to endure now and then, on tense nights in the flat.

Within a couple minutes, he convinced himself it was because she was anxious about sharing a bed for the first time since… everything. By the time she was out of the shower, he’d called up some extra blankets from the front desk (not without a struggle and reading verbatim from his pocket book) and set up sleeping arrangements on the loveseat. He was reading the book he’d picked up before they arrived, a tome about the tenuous political status of the Republic of China, his legs hoisted up and over the arm of the too-small couch, when she entered the room.

She didn’t comment on how comfortable he did or didn’t look, which he assumed was a tacit indicator of guilty appreciation.

Like every night since they arrived in this universe, though, they stayed up well past midnight, still filling each other in on the major events of the last few years. Rose was lying on her stomach for a while, feet kicking restlessly in the air as the Doctor tried to explain the year that never was, and the Doctor propped himself on his elbow, intense concentration on his face as Rose finally confessed the worst of the failed cannon launches and wrong universes.

Only one tear had to escape her tired eyes when she told the Doctor she’d found him dead, and he abandoned his plan to have them sleep separately.

He leapt onto the bed and gathered her in his arms, and as she cuddled against his chest he felt the tears continue to soak his shirt as he squeezed her against him with all his might, whispering apologies that would never be enough to erase that kind of trauma. Only time could.

On his insistence, they ordered ice cream from room service as soon as the last of Rose’s sniffles went away. He told her some of the funnier stories he had stockpiled from her absence as they ate, replacing tears of sadness with ones of laughter.

Eventually, after a third episode of a soap opera they were outrageously badly translating to English by the faces and the context, they were tired enough to sleep. Tucked in the blankets in each other’s arms, it suddenly didn’t feel too awkward or too soon for a new level of intimacy. It was just the natural progression of things, something that had never felt more right back on the TARDIS than it did now.

“Doctor?” Rose whispered, startling the Doctor from semi-consciousness.

“Hmm?” he mumbled sleepily.

“D’you ever feel... trapped?” she asked, quiet and hesitant.

He forced his eyes open and sought out her face in the darkness, dimly lit by the gray moonlight filtering through the window.

“Why do you ask?”

“I dunno, just... I remember feelin’ trapped. When I was stuck here, before. Like I didn’t belong here, sometimes ‘s like I was... suffocatin’. The world, the flat, the Torchwood building. It all just felt so… confining. An’ I can’t imagine what it must be like for you.”

“I don’t feel trapped,” he hedged, cautiously. “But the world does feel very small.” She was elated he was being open with her about this, but it still ached that she’d hit the mark. “I miss the TARDIS. Up here.” He tapped at his temple a few times. “I miss the stars. New galaxies, planets to visit every day.”

“Can’t wait ‘til ours is grown.” She was at a loss for anything else to say, in the wake of his melancholy honesty.

“Me too. Not long, yet, though, relatively speaking.”

“But Rose, I want you to know, even if he...” he cringed and amended his choice of words. “Even if we didn’t have the TARDIS coral, I wouldn’t trade this for it. I wouldn’t trade you. For anything.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.” He spoke louder, not allowing even a tiny seed of disbelief to sprout in Rose’s mind. “I’ve had to live without you. And it’s not something I ever want to do again.”

She kissed him then, wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing gratitude and joy against his lips. But she didn’t deepen it, didn’t lose control like he’d developed a reputation for doing, and he respected her implicit wishes to keep the affection chaste.

“You know what, Rose?” he whispered when she released him. “I’ve got an idea.”

The Doctor scrambled off the bed, motioning his arm for her to follow suit as he dug around in his luggage for the sonic screwdriver.

“Just a mo’!” he shouted, barreling towards the door. It flew open in his arm and he peeked his head outside, checking both directions for anyone still roaming the hallways. Finding no one, he turned back to Rose.

“Want to sleep under the stars, Rose Tyler?”

\---

The journey to the elevator was difficult, Rose carrying their pillows, blankets, and the room key, while the Doctor, sonic between his teeth, awkwardly dragged the (surprisingly heavy) hotel mattress down the hall, sheets and duvet still clinging to it.

They’d noticed it was a service-sized elevator earlier, when they dropped off their things, but neither of them thought the evening would come to this. It was a tight squeeze, the two of them and the mattress, bending in the middle to squeeze into the tight space, but they could only laugh as the doors closed and they still hadn’t been caught, high on the artificial thrill.

A bit of jiggery-pokery from the Doctor, and the little light for the roof setting glowed orange, even though it was normally restricted to key access.

The sight that greeted them as the doors opened was far from glamorous.

Air conditioning units, steam vents, pipes, and some smokestacks cluttered the rooftop in varying shades of black and gray, and neighboring buildings blocked most of the view of the adjacent scenery.

“Come on then!” whispered the Doctor, hauling the mattress between the doors before they could close again. And suddenly none of it mattered to either of them.

The Doctor set the mattress carefully blanket-side up in the middle of the roof, as far from the noise and heat of the units as possible, and Rose threw the pillows and blankets atop.

The chilly cement ground under their bare feet rushed them both under the duvet within a few seconds of getting everything haphazardly situated.

“Now,” the Doctor panted, still out of breath from hauling the mattress, as he took her hand under the covers. “The light pollution makes it a bit harder to see, but, still plenty of twinkling lights, if you ask me.”

Lying on their backs, looking straight up at the sky and blocking other buildings out of the periphery, they almost forgot they were on a rooftop in a busy city. The sounds of rushing cars became white noise that they both drowned out as the Doctor pointed up at hazy constellations as he recognized them, and tried to explain the placement of missing stars that were too dim to see.

“All we need now’s a meteor shower. D’you remember?” Rose scooted closer, nudged his shoulder with her own as she burrowed into his side.

“Ohh, how could I forget?”

“One of ‘em almost crashed straight into the TARDIS.” She scoffed.

“Oi!” He nudged her back. “I was trying to get the best view possible. It was a romantic gesture!”

“Romantic? Really? I didn’t realize you knew the meanin’ of the word.”

“Weeeell. I may not have admitted it. Well, at the time, I mean. But I did. I mean, it was. Romantic, that is. But anyway, it _didn’t_ hit us. And that’s what counts, eh?”

“Yeah.” She chuckled, turning her head to nuzzle into his neck. He was _so warm_. Warmer, she thought, than he was when he was a hundred percent Time Lord. And smelled like clean soap and minty shampoo and it made her eyes suddenly quite droopy. He sighed contentedly, readjusting to rest his cheek on her hair, inhaling damp honey and coconut until his eyes started to drift closed, too. 

“This’s perfect, Doctor. Thank you.”

“Mmm. Thank you.” He swiped his thumb over her hand, slow and soothing.

“Love you,” she breathed against his neck.

“Love you,” he murmured back.

It was the first time he’d said it since the beach, and the first she’d said it since she was just an image in the TARDIS. Finally at peace in each other’s arms, the reassurance contained in those two words lulled them both to sleep in seconds.

\---

They were woken far too early by the confused shouting of a maintenance bloke, admonishing the odd, irreverent tourist couple. They helped bring the mattress back to their (former) room, and apologized to both the appalled electrician and the hotel manager profusely, but it was no use.

But even though the remainder of their reservation was canceled and they were ejected from the hotel, they agreed it was worth it over tea and egg Mantous. There were dozens of other hotels within biking distance, anyway.


End file.
